“We were part of something very special – it felt like something new”: How BFMV and Trivium captured lightning in a bottle

It will also be the first time the two bands have toured together. Though even the Matts themselves note that this is something that would have made sense at any point, to do it now, as a marker of something so important, only adds to the gravitas.

“I remember hearing Bullet for the first time when the Hand Of Blood EP came out [in 2005],” says Heafy. “I thought, ‘This is amazing – there's a little bit of American metal, a little bit of Swedish melodic death metal on the riffs, a little bit of New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, a little bit of aggression.’”

“What this tour represents is almost even cooler than us just playing together, in a way,” adds Tuck. “It's taken this long to do it, and what it represents for both bands is a very special, pivotal moment in our careers. And, I think, for heavy metal music in general. Back in 2005 when those albums came out, we were part of something very special. And it felt that it was something new. It was exciting. There was a thing happening. And what a way to mark it.”

“It's amazing to see two bands that have had very similar upbringings, very similar careers, very similar up and downs, very similar everything,” continues Heafy. “It's been really comforting to talk to another person who's been through it basically the same way I have, because that's almost never happened. I've never really met another musician that went through it the same way that I did, other than my own bandmates.”

Matt Tuck is right when he says the period around these albums felt like a moment. And Heafy is right to note just how similar both bands had it. After over a decade in which most metal cut from such a traditional cloth, with guitar heroics and a thrashy edge, wasn’t particularly cool in either man’s home country, something was picking up again. The likes of Killswitch Engage and Lamb Of God were cutting through the mushy end of nu-metal, and Metallica and Slayer had remained, of course, consistently popular. But it was these groups of ambitious youngsters with their cocky, shredding frontmen who wanted the world that helped draw the biggest line.

“We don't want to live in the past too much,” says Tuck. “But that album for us, and that album for Trivium, and for the metal world at that point in that time, it was just such a special thing.”

“It went by so fast,” laughs Heafy. “We were so in the current of this moment and so in the work that we didn't get to sit there and enjoy it. I've said over the years: I wish I could go back and re-experience that so I could just be present and truly enjoy it. And wow, look at this. We get a second chance to actually go be present and enjoy it in a much larger scale.”

As they look back and digest the period they refer to with phrases like “whirlwind” and “fucking crazy”, both also remark more than once on just how similarly the two bands rose. Watching it from the outside at the time, the speed with which they seemed to vault up to the next venue, the next festival stage, was a fast-forward of the usual pace.

“We were doing basically the same things,” grins Heafy. “If one of us were on a magazine cover, the other would be a special inside it, and then two weeks later it would have swapped around.”

It was Trivium’s first trip to the UK in early 2005 that gave the first tinglings that something was about to happen. After joining the band as a literal schoolboy, before he was old enough to legally go to half the venues Trivium would play, he and his bandmates had already grafted hard enough to have released their 2003 Ember To Inferno debut through U.S. underground label Lifeforce, got signed to Roadrunner for their second, and broken out of Florida to begin touring America.

One such tour had been Roadrunner’s Roadrage package. In 2004 Trivium had gone out on the jaunt headlined by Machine Head, and featuring fellow new breeders 3 Inches Of Blood. In spring 2005, to celebrate the label’s 25th birthday, a second round hit the States, comprised of Trivium, 3IOB, Still Remains and The Agony Scene. Such was the reaction, one might most politely call Trivium’s duty “character building”.

“At that point, nobody cared about us,” recalls Heafy. “On one of those tours, I remember we had a loading dock as a dressing room one of the days, and six waters in a plastic bag for our rider. Living like that, eating Taco Bell once a day, taking sink showers in a gas station… all bands should start that way.”

When the tour’s European leg started a few weeks later, he figured their debut visit would yield much the same.

“A lot of the bands we supported were like, ‘Oh man, you don't want to tour Europe and the UK!’” he laughs. “I remember I one of the first bands I ever met, they said they would take sleeping pills all day just to avoid everything, then wake up for the show and then take more sleeping pills. They told us Europe is this terrible, terrible place, and England is this terrible place. We were like, ‘Oh my God, we don't want to go over there…’”

When they arrived, however, this image was shattered by “some of the best food we’d ever had and some of the best people we’d ever met”. Who cares, thought the singer, that nobody knew who they were? That’s the job they were here to do, anyway. Except, as it turns out, they’d already done it without realising.

“It was at the Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton, and before we go on we hear a Trivium chant. Everybody in there is chanting Trivium. The room is sold out. We go out there, and everyone knew every single word to every single song. We went to the merch table, and the entire crowd cleared out while the other two bands were on, and were just getting stuff signed by us. Then instantly we became the headliner and then played the London show at The Garage.”

A couple of months later, Trivium were booked for Download. With things spiralling so quickly, they’d been punted up the bill from the smallest tent, to opening the Main Stage.

“We drove for a couple days. None of us really slept. My voice sounded like crap. We looked like crap. I didn't warm up. It was 10:45 and we're standing by the stage. Our backdrop looked like a postage stamp. My voice was barely making a croak. We went up onstage at 11. There was no-one there. And then… it was like the scene out of Braveheart. There were 40,000 people running up this hill, and everyone knew every single word. It was such an adrenaline dump, I basically only remember 30, 60 minutes after that.”

At the same time, several thousand miles from Florida, in Bridgend, South Wales, Matt Tuck and Bullet were finally starting to pick up steam, after chipping away for years, and often finding themselves hitting walls.

“We'd worked since we were, like, 14 years old, to get to that point,” he remembers. “I come from a small, little Welsh village, so it was always just a dream. No-one ever anticipated it was going to happen. Not even me, if I'm honest!”

Following the release of their self-titled EP at the end of 2004, however, things started happening. Quickly, they began recording what would become The Poison, despite admitting that they didn’t have enough material and would just “make it work” in the studio. As with their Main Stage performance at Reading in the summer of 2005 shortly before the album’s release, Tuck holds it up as an example of the attitude with which they approached everything.

“We were so fearless, dude,” he says. “We didn't give two shits about the scale of the occasion. We were just so hungry. We were so fearless. We were so ready that we took everything in our stride – nothing intimidated us. Didn't matter who was on before us, who was after us, how many people were there or how many people weren't there. We were going to seize the opportunity with everything we had and with all that attitude, with all the cockiness, with all the everything you want in a young, hungry band.

“Same in the studio,” he adds. “I react well to pressure, and I back myself as a songwriter, so we just said, ‘Fuck it.’ We knew we could make it work, and it added to the energy and insanity of the time.”

Trivium and Bullet were marked by grandstanding aspiration, and each had a singer who could talk a very big game indeed. The former’s early appearances in the pages of Kerrang! were notable for Heafy’s repeated desire to be the next Metallica. It was a similar thing for the latter, with Tuck even going so far as to confidently predict that “our next album will sell two million”. Bands didn’t normally talk like that. Or, if they did, looked like dicks doing it. Not the Matts. It was rather exciting, actually.

“When I was 12 years old I said, ‘I want to headline arenas in a metal band.’ That was my goal,” says Heafy. “Nowadays, when people have these giant goals, people do love it, but at our time, that was a very, very bad thing, and that's why we had a lot of backlash from bands, from press that didn't like us, from fans that didn't like us. They were like, ‘Who are these cocky bastards?’ But I would say, if I see a new young band come out saying that they're going to be the biggest band in the world, I think, ‘That's great. Let's see it.’”

It’s not cocky if you pull it off, though. Looking back today, both admit that the year or so after their respective albums knocked them forward like a Tiger Woods powerdrive is a blur. Even though Heafy says that Trivium’s return to America, having conquered in the UK and Europe, wasn’t the warmest (“Our favourite bands all of a sudden hated us because of all the attention we had in the UK. Bands I grew up worshiping were bullying me to my face, about my voice, about my hair, the way I dress, the way I looked…”), he was also drafted in to be one of the leaders on Roadrunner’s all-star Roadrunner United album. Meanwhile, Ascendancy sold, and sold, and Trivium didn’t stop moving. And, anyway, Lars Ulrich and Metallica were fans, so chalk that up in the ever-growing ‘win’ pile as well.

For Bullet, America was a different story. On their first visit, they’d been opening. When they returned a few months later, they were selling thousands of tickets a night under their own name.

Where a couple of years previously he’d been working in a call centre, Tuck suddenly found himself opening for Guns N’ Roses in New York, hanging out with Axl Rose at an aftershow where he also bumped into Mickey Rourke, Lenny Kravitz, Matthew Perry and Scarlett Johansson. And this was one moment of many in an 18-month window where every day seemed to bring some once-in-a-lifetime dream thing to their door.

“It's hard to explain unless you've been there in that situation,” he ponders now. “You could feel an energy. We couldn't believe what was happening. I think for any young band to be put in that situation, it's… not hard to deal with, but to try and absorb it and be in the moment. We just went with the flow – ‘Bosh! There we go, Kerrang! cover. Bosh! Sold out Brixton Academy.’ Okay, this is rock’n’roll. This is cool. We like this.”

Again, from the inside, this was a blur of just What You Did. Tuck says it wasn’t until they stopped at the end of it that he realised quite how long the rollercoaster they’d been on had actually been.

“I found stopping very difficult to deal with,” he says. “I had really bad anxiety. I couldn't sleep for days. It was just my body's way of dealing with going from nothing to 100 so quickly, and staying at 100 for two years, and then going back to zero. I went back home to my parents’ and didn't really know how to function for a couple of weeks. My body had to adjust to not being on tour – I didn't have to get on the plane, didn't have to sing, I didn't have to do an interview, there was no photo shoot. It was chaos.”

Tuck says he’s been having to re-engage with some songs ready for tour – Hit The Floor and 10 Years Today – which haven’t been aired in years. For Trivium, Heafy explains that his regimen of singing and playing guitar for hours every day, not to mention most of the songs appearing in setlists anyway, mean they’ve been match-fit for ages.

Both, however, have found something in properly digging back into their music, and therefore themselves, from 20 years ago. Heafy reveals that as well as noticing how much advanced musical theory his teenaged self was employing without realising it, his lyrics remain prescient and relevant to his life.

“Man, I'm still dealing with a lot of these same issues,” he says. “I’d looked inwards and talked about these troubles in myself, these difficulties of the way I deal with life for myself and coping with these things. As an adult, I've been truly spending this last year learning all about it, doing extensive therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, psychiatry, all these different things to figure out what makes me tick. And I've found out I have OCD, ADHD, extremely high anxiety. These things can couple up and pair into depression, anger, self-loathing. I look back at these lyrics like, ‘Wow, these have always been here.’”

For Tuck, now a seasoned songwriter, he finds some of his creative choices at the time were “weird”.

“The structures on The Poison are just bizarre,” he smiles. “Maybe that was part of the beauty. It wasn't predictable in any way. There’s these random sections in the middles, or a song will be finished, and then this mad eight-bar outro will happen for no reason. Tears Don't Fall – what's happening in that middle bit?!”

It’s too late to wonder such things now. Twenty years on, these albums remain sharp, and their creators bigger than ever. Neither Matt wants to think too hard about the number, or enjoys it when K! points out that the time difference to then and now is greater than the albums’ own distance from Master Of Puppets or Reign In Blood. Both, though, are relishing the moment.

“I always wanted this,” says Tuck in closing. “For it to manifest and to be able to make it happen like we did is a pretty phenomenal achievement. I just remember it being the most exciting time of our lives. Because it was. And it’s fucking great to do this again, together.

“I’m fuckin’ up for it!”

Bullet For My Valentine and Trivium tour the UK in January and February – get your tickets now. Bullet will then play at Download Festival in June and Trivium will headline Bloodstock in August.

Read this next:

• Listen to Trivium’s Matt Heafy on the Kerrang! In Conversation podcast
• Bullet For My Valentine’s Matt Tuck: “This was never given to us. We worked our arses off…”
• Trivium’s Matt Heafy: My life in 10 songs